White Paper

Solving Content Management and Content Use Challenges with Technology

An Infotrieve White Paper

Challenges for Information Centers

In spite of numerous discussions about the growing information society in recent years, information centers globally are struggling to prove their value to senior management within the organization. This may be due to a lack of understanding in management circles as to what value information centers really add, or the impression that individuals can legitimately access whatever information they need on their own. As a result, information center budgets are being cut affecting the level of service, the amount of content licensed, and the staff expertise to find, secure, and deliver copyright compliant information.

In actuality, information managers are of critical strategic value to organizations of all sizes. They are valuable partners to researchers, scientists, strategic planning executives, and marketing and sales organizations. Information professionals save organizations time and money by knowing the intricacies of searching to ensure no important articles are missed. In addition, they know how to find copyright compliant copies of that information ensuring that all information is used legitimately, and can do so quickly, effectively, and efficiently. The work information professionals do on a daily basis speeds up the new product development cycle in a number of ways. Information managers make sure duplicate research is not done and provide insight into competitors and their products. They provide background and support to marketing and sales teams, and they protect the company legally by making sure all information is secured and disseminated following detailed license agreements and often-obscure copyright regulations.

Because of market conditions, today’s information managers are forced to look for alternate ways to provide service, manage increased expectations from users, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks while doing so with fewer resources. Creative and innovative technology solutions are needed for information managers from their vendor partners in order to meet the increased demands and higher expectations.

The Evolution

The advent of the Internet in the 1990s brought about a lot of changes for information centers and users alike. Until then, user expectations of information center services were focused on prompt delivery, responsive customer service, and reasonable fees. Retrieving content was mainly a manual act of searching reference tools for print libraries, which delivered hard copies of articles via surface mail, overnight mail, or fax. It was easy to manage copyright regulations as all information was being sourced through experts that handled the compliancy procedures before a document was sent out.

The increasing use of personal computers in offices and the accessibility of information on the Internet led to an explosion of expectations and needs. Where in the past, for example, content users were happy with a clean copy of an article within three to five working days, they now expect fast electronic delivery by email. Rapid development of technologies at the publishers’ side revolutionized access to content though often with the information center as the gatekeeper.

Today, there is an abundance of technologies, databases, and meta-tagged content available from database vendors and publishers. All of them make finding information very easy. With so many disparate technologies available, the challenges now lie in bringing those technologies together and delivering content of the highest possible quality, at the lowest cost directly to the desktop of users, 100% copyright compliant and as quickly as possible.

The Players

Database providers offer access to full text but only selectively and not always with graphics or tables. Usually access is offered on a pay-per-view basis directly from the publisher with non-negotiable prices. Independent agreements reached by the information center with a publisher are not always included. Users are then forced to employ different platforms for searching and ordering, or to purchase a more expensive copy of a full text article directly from the database provider. Additionally, when articles are obtained via database platforms it usually implies personal usage and cannot be used for commercial purposes or shared.

Publishers are trying to meet customers’ demands by developing new mechanisms for access and delivery on their own platforms. These mechanisms are usually expensive, and nascent costs are handed down to users through license agreements and subscription prices. This has a direct impact on information centers’ acquisition practices as budgets are tending to decrease, or at best frozen at last year’s level. However, prices for qualified content continue to rise at a steady 10% to 15% annually.

Information centers, faced by this downhill trend in budgets, are additionally impacted by cuts in staff. Often internal competition is high; various departments often offer similar services, but may market them better than information centers as being business critical. Typically, these internal competitors aren’t even aware of each other. Information centers also face competition from vendors that are targeting users directly with new information tools and services.
The challenge for information centers is in offering value-added services to users that meet their expectations in this “Google® search” world. The ultimate objective is to streamline and optimize content management processes and to ensure cost-effective access to the highest quality information resources. Correlating pieces of information with specific business decisions and outcomes becomes increasingly vital in order to justify expenditures for high quality tools.

What’s Next

Information centers are required to find innovative ways of providing content, and are no longer going to settle for an assortment of technologies that don’t work together. They must be able to use platforms that can cross-search various resources (including internal data, in-house article collections, eJournal holdings), perhaps even offer central storage for copyright cleared articles and – most importantly – can link the searching process to the ordering process.
A crucial element for information centers is having an integrated document delivery service that is fast, accurate and of high quality. Across all business sectors, 75% to 80% of information centers offer document delivery to their patrons, according to a benchmark on the topic published by Outsell Inc. in 20081.

However, it is increasingly a self-service with the information center merely managing administration and first-level training, if needed.

Simplifying content license management must also be addressed by new technologies. With each publisher offering their own licensing model, license management has become one of the most important administrative tasks for information centers. To complicate matters, there aren’t only electronic licenses to be considered, but those for print holdings as well, and no two licenses are alike.

Another issue often underestimated by users, purchasing departments and management alike is the impact of geographic diversion on licenses. The number of sites and geographic locations has a strong bearing on prices and can hamper the access to content. With requirements from publishers to pinpoint the use of content to a specific user and usage, the need for technological support rises tremendously.

Maintaining copyright compliancy is another critical factor for information centers. Information professionals around the globe are increasingly involved in giving legal counsel to their organization and its users. They need to automate redistribution rights as they vary for vendors, publishers, and by geography.

With all these aspects to consider, information centers need technological solutions to make document delivery an easy-to­use, user-oriented (self-service), content valuing and value adding service that meet all copyright and regulatory requirements.

A Complete Solution

In response to the critical needs of today’s information professionals, Infotrieve, the global leader in business service solutions for information centers, developed a revolutionary web-based solution, Content SCM®. Content SCM automates document sourcing and delivery with a full array of rights management capabilities, copyright compliance auditing, and a complete view of content usage throughout the entire organization – both pay-per-view and licensed content – built right in. It’s the only product on the market which brings document delivery and rights management together in one seamless solution.

Infotrieve has vast experience in all aspects of information center management and, as a result, has a clear understanding of the needs of the information professional. Infotrieve’s areas of expertise include content licensing, document delivery, copyright compliance, usage analysis, collection management, library services and staffing.

Content SCM®, a Revolutionary Solution

Content SCM is a unique content supply chain management platform designed from the point of view of the content user and the administrator responsible for managing, purchasing, and ensuring copyright compliance. With very little training, it allows end users to search for content, select which specific articles to order, indicate the intended usage for the article so that the correct copyright permissions are granted, and track those orders as they move through the document delivery process.

More than 50% of the articles are delivered electronically in five minutes or less with the balance easily beating other typical document delivery service standards.

Users can either search within an organization’s own collection, Infotrieve’s extensive bibliographic database, or both if the subject matter is unknown. Additionally, users can search the external platforms subscribed to by the organization and provided by the information center. These platforms are integrated enabling a direct data transfer by checking the order button on the external platform.

Before placing an order, the user has to actively decide on the usage of the article. Several usages are pre-defined but can be customized according to an organization’s needs. Usages include sharing internally or with external business partners, storing in internal databases, and using for regulatory purposes. Users can also choose from a list of special services such as purchasing a title page, color copy, publisher original only or translation. The combination of delivery address, usage and special services determines the cost of an article and its associated copyrights.
For internal tracking purposes, users can add information such as cost centers, purchase order numbers or other customer order information.

Once the order has been placed in the shopping cart, the system automatically checks the availability of an article against the in-house collections (print and electronic), as well as existing license agreements. Only if existing copyrights don’t cover the usage required or the article is not available through internal sources will an order be fulfilled externally on a pay­per-view basis.

Infotrieve maintains direct agreements with 140 publishers, 136 of which grant Infotrieve the right to download and disseminate publisher-original documents. In addition, Infotrieve’s on-site STM Library™ represents a vast source of scientific, technical, and medical print literature that can be rapidly accessed to produce high-quality electronic documents that are reasonable facsimiles of publisher-original documents.

Infotrieve generally clears copyrights under the auspices of its direct publisher agreements to ensure compliant delivery. To a lesser extent, Infotrieve clears copyrights through the CCC and has the capability of clearing copyrights directly with a rights-holder, in the absence of any other clearance venue.

All orders are tracked for documentation purposes. Users can see the status of their orders at any time after logging on. For their own records, detailed reports are available for download in any format, listing orders with usage and associated costs.

Information centers have control of the administration of the system. Administrators are able to configure the system in almost any way they want. They can create users, user groups, cost centers and divisions, and assign rights and views to them as needed. User groups can have a departmental administrator with similar rights. Administrative rights for managing licenses and collections as well as invoicing information are restricted to the information center. So, too, are creating types of usage and developing and managing reports. Administrators can use the detailed usage data to better understand which content is being used, as well as how often it’s being used, and by whom so that better informed licensing decisions can be made.

Content SCM® is a web-based application and configuration of the system is comparatively easy. Infotrieve works closely with the project manager of the client organization to prepare the platform for its final layout. This includes uploading licenses and journal holdings, customizing the system to the organization’s needs, piloting the platform with power users while closely monitoring each action, and training administrators and users – all prior to the launch.
Once everything has been set up, Infotrieve provides a link to the platform that can be integrated on the information center’s website, on the organization’s intranet or an internal information portal. Anyone in the organization can access the system using a web browser.

Content SCM offers self-registration (no IT interaction required) or can be pre-populated using the organization’s active directory. The latter reduces the need for yet another login for the user; using self-registration asks users to actively register before log on. Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages that should be evaluated by the information center in cooperation with internal key users to make implementation as effective as possible.

Conclusion

In today’s fast paced, information-centric environment, everyone expects immediate access to published content from wherever they are. Because it has become very easy to find and share content, companies need to do everything possible to make sure that the content used for commercial purposes is secured and shared with others both cost effectively and in compliance with copyright regulations.

Content SCM meets the needs of today’s information professionals by providing greater accountability for copyright compliancy, easier management of licenses and collections, facilitated user management and centralized cost-tracking. This revolutionary end-to-end solution supports the optimization of content licensing, as well as the tedious rights administration process. Using Content SCM significantly reduces time spent by information professionals on document supply – time that can be better spent on other core activities of the information center that support the business of the organization.

1 Information Management Service: Document Delivery – Best Practices and Vendor Scorecard, Volume 11, April 10, 2008

Infotrieve is a global leader in consulting and business service solutions for information centers in large and middle-market corporations with substantial resources dedicated to research and development. Infotrieve’s expertise includes people, process, and technology solutions for all elements of information center management, content licensing, document delivery, copyright compliance, usage analysis, and collection management. www.infotrieve.com  © 2009 Infotrieve, Inc.